Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about economic growth. We seem to automatically assume that economic growth is necessary, it is good; it is to be a mutual goal. I keep wondering just what the heck that means. Some estimates indicate that 131 million housing units remain empty in the USA. Apparently we do not need growth there. According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics for 2009 there are 254,212,610 registered passenger vehicles. It would seem we need no growth there. I’ve been told that economic growth is measured by the Gross Domestic Product; it would seem to me that we really don’t need to keep growing here in the good old US of A. It looks to me like we have more of an economic distribution issue. We seem to have built a society and economic system hell bent on building unfathomable wealth for a chosen few. We even build growth and wealth on products that don’t exist, like credit and interest on money. Somebody please explain to me how the GDP increase based on the interest I pay on a credit card or a bank loan. Where is the new product to be measured in GDP? Far better minds than mine have pondered this. None the less, it looks to me like we have hit the growth wall. We pretty much seem to have harvested all the real value in goods and services. What we do seem to do well at is transferring the existing wealth from one unprivileged group to a more privileged group. We’ve even gotten immaculate in our marketing efforts convincing the under privileged group that their hard work and efforts will one day lead to the meek inheriting the earth. I await the diatribe to follow. :$
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 17:21:40 +0000